By SOMINI SENGUPTA
July 19, 2006
NEW DELHI — As India’s financial capital, Mumbai, observed a moment of silence on Tuesday to commemorate the seven bombings of commuter trains seven days ago, a blistering silence blanketed the Indian blogosphere.
For reasons yet to be articulated by the authorities, the government has directed local Internet service providers to block access to a handful of Web sites that are hosts to blogs, including the popular blogspot.com, according to government officials and some of the providers.
The move has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.
Nilanjana Roy, a Delhi-based writer who runs kitabkhana.blogspot.com, a literary blog, called it “a dangerous precedent.”
“You have a right to know what is being banned, and why it’s being banned,” she said. “I can understand if it’s China or Iran or Saudi Arabia. I’m truly appalled when it’s my country doing this.”
The ban, which has come into effect in recent days, means that people living in India are, in theory, kept from reading anything that appears on the blocked platforms, whether Indian blogs or otherwise.
But the ban seems far from effective. Some Internet providers have blocked access. Others have not, and many more blog aficionados have figured out how to continue reading their favorite sites.
One Web site offers help, by way of a free blog “gateway.” “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?” it asks, and goes on to offer instructions for outwitting the restrictions.
That site was prompted by the efforts of the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block blogspot.com in February, as a way to prevent the proliferation of Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
On Thursday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered the block of blogspot.com “due to security reasons.” Another service provider in Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.
Officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry’s department of information and technology, said he was aware of “two pages” that had been blocked for spreading what he called anti-national sentiments, but did not provide details.
The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, the highest-ranking civil servant in the sector, hung up the phone when reached at home.
The tempest is a testament to growing government anxiety about how to control this mushrooming medium.
Like blogs anywhere, Indian blogs serve as forums to pontificate on national passions: books, movies, politics, cricket. There are blogs devoted to everyday self-indulgence: One blogger, a self-described amateur photographer, writes of jogging in the monsoon, while another recalls what she wore to a cocktail party.
And there are blogs that strive to be public service tools, including one that within hours of the Mumbai train bombings began listing phone numbers of hospitals where victims were taken. Called mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, it is now blocked.
The attacks in Mumbai killed 182 people and injured more than 700. Frenetic Mumbai observed a short silence on Tuesday in memory of the victims.
It is impossible to know how many Indian blogs are affected. One blogger, Mitesh Vasa, from Vienna, Va., has documented “40,128 Indian bloggers who mention India as their country.” That does not include those who do not identify the country they are based in, nor others who identify their country of origin, as Peter Griffin does from Mumbai, as “utopia.”
Mr. Griffin, who helped set up the mumbaihelp site, said he woke up Tuesday morning to a furious litany of 300 e-mail messages, mostly from bloggers enraged by the blockade.
Among the speculation offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations. “Even if that were true, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Griffin argued. Anyone with a domain name, he said, could effectively do the same thing on an ordinary Web site.